Donald Trump has the top leaders of the business and money world feeling kind of jumped, or so The Wall Street Journal indicates. They’ve been spun around in bed. In “Corporate America’s Euphoria Over Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ Is Giving Way to Distress,” a named source alleges an “overriding sense of helplessness” among them. “CEOs are feeling stunned, and they’re not used to feeling like they don’t have good moves,” he says. For instance, they didn’t want tariffs and now looks like it’s tariffs. “Tariffs are inflationary and would strengthen the dollar—hardly a good starting point for a U.S. industrial renaissance,” a maven wrote 14 months ago. He’s treasury secretary now and he’s for tariffs. He didn’t get there smoothly; it may have been brief, but it wasn’t smooth.
“Everything could happen,” Trump says (Fox News interview). That’s the environment business leaders have to live in. Recession’s one possibility; with the tariffs he’s ready to swamp the boat. But also, there are CEOs who feel they have to keep quiet “because of fears of public criticism from the administration.” They’re afraid of him.
The right talks about Trump derangement syndrome, meaning the ability to see their leader as he is and not as they imagine. The Journal chronicles the business-financial sphere’s jolting case of Trump shock, which I’d call the discovery that he’s as bad as you always had reason to believe. “Wall Street investors and big businesses believed he would ultimately dial back [his] rhetoric,” the article says. Instead he’s dialed up his rhetoric and his actions, which have proved alarming. “Here’s the interesting thing about the stock market: it cannot be indicted, arrested or deported; it cannot be intimidated, threatened or bullied,” a defiant Michael Cembalest told JPMorgan and Wall Street at large. (But they have stock markets in dictatorships, don’t they? Not Cuba, of course, but there’s the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Budapest Stock Exchange.)
Meanwhile, the tariffs, which Trump bills as a long game. “If you look at China, they have a 100-year perspective,” he told Fox News. The article: “By the next day, all of the gains in the three major stock indexes since Trump’s election had been erased.”
Things have been tense. The “heads of America’s three biggest automakers… were patched through to the Oval Office,” and Trump told them “he’d give the executives another month before the tariffs kicked in—but only a month.” The boss talked to them like a coach to scrub players, if you go by Trump’s press secretary. “He told them that they should get on it, start investing, start moving,” she said.
The tariffs may not be a bluff, but maybe they’re a strongarm attempt on the money world. The article doesn’t ask, instead accepting that they’re really a policy initiative. Trump wants to “remake a global trading system,” we’re told (a system “that has contributed to steady declines in the prices of consumer goods over the past three decades”). He’s a man with an idea.
I think “true mercantilist” means something special in the following: “The president is a true mercantilist and just isn’t going to believe forecasts about how bad this can get,’ said Michael Strain, head of economic-policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. ‘He needs to put his hand to the hot stove and leave it there until he can’t bear it.’” To fill in subtext: We wait for the chief executive’s mental system to process, for sense data to arrive in his skull and override its pile of ham-brained misconceptions. Mr. Strain concludes, “The question is how long will that take?’”
Trump, to reporters at the White House: “You’re going to see billions of dollars, even trillions of dollars, coming into our country very soon, in the form of tariffs.” He said “into” and “in the form of.” He didn’t say the tariffs would build businesses in the US and thus generate money. He said the tariffs, in themselves, would be money that entered the United States. But tariffs are paid by people in the same country that imposes the tariffs. Buy a foreign car in the US and you’ll be paying the government for the chance to buy it. The money starts and finishes in the United States; it’s always there. The only change is that it shifts from your pocket to the government’s.
“Now, CEOs who cheered Trump’s tax and regulatory cuts have grown increasingly pessimistic,” we’re told. They’re the same CEOs who are afraid to talk. We have a regime that likes to mug people; even worse, it’s run by a true mercantilist. Anyway, I read it in The Wall Street Journal.